Comments on: Cobra Mk 3http://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3/
Comments on MetaFilter post Cobra Mk 3Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:58:09 -0800Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:58:09 -0800en-ushttp://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss60Cobra Mk 3http://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3
This month marks the <a href="http://elite.frontier.co.uk/">25th aniversary of Elite</a>, the groundbreaking 3D space trading game. <a href="http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/the-making-of-elite">The making of Elite</a>. More on the making of Elite from <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/18/features.weekend">The Backroom Boys</a>. <a href="http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/bbc/index.htm">Emulate</a> the original <a href="http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/history.php3">BBC Micro</a> version. <a href="http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/dkwheel.htm">The Dark Wheel</a>.post:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:51:39 -0800ArtwgamesgamingEliteIanBellDavidBrabenAcornBBCBBCMicroSpaceTradeTradingCobraAspWitchSpaceUKBy: Artwhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747534
Though the BBC B Microcomputer is of course the proper platform for playing Elite Ian Bell actually recommends the <a href="http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/nes/index.htm">NES version</a>. I'm not usre playing it on a game console would have quite the same illicit thrill as misusing educational equipment to play the game (you'd have to be some insuferable posho knobend to own your own BBC, of course, real kids had the Speccy or the C=64).comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747534Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:58:09 -0800ArtwBy: Leonhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747562
<em>you'd have to be some insuferable posho knobend to own your own BBC</em>
I heard that, you horrible plebeian. Enjoy touch-typing on your rubber keyboard.
25 years, and still nothing quite like it. <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">Oolite</a>'s a pretty good GPL'd version, BTW.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747562Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:14:04 -0800LeonBy: WPWhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747575
Elite. What a game. A long trek, fleeing trouble, searching for a place to trade, practising docking. Then a friendly star cluster, with some nice price differentials between certain goods. A routine, buying and selling, plying the same route - the earliest game I knew that felt like a job, before I knew what a job was, and yet I still wanted to play. Eventually, the credits built up, and you could buy better lasers, autodock equipment, some nice toys ... and then you could get your good for free, with the old directed-plasma discount, firing into a fleeing ship retroburners, listening to the burbling electronic noise of the weapons and the harsh buzz of contact against a target hull, waiting for that sweet moment when it burst like a ripe seed pod. Accelerating into the expanding cloud of debris, chasing those hexagonal cargo containers from the destroyed ship, watching the screen for other targets, or the police. Eventually, a jump, each time with the lurking thought ... what if I end up in Witch Space ...
Just a perfect game.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747575Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:34:50 -0800WPWBy: Hardcore Poserhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747584
The C64 version of this kicked arse over everything else at the time; arcade games included. I remember being impressed as hell that that many lines could be rendered so smoothly in realtime. Of course the processors at the time had clock speeds measured in MHz rather than GHz, so it was impressive then. You kids with your voxels and your shaders and GPUs and subpixel doodads, don't know what REAL coding is, etc. etc...comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747584Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:44:07 -0800Hardcore PoserBy: Nelsonhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747604
25 years, wow! No other video game has ever quite matched the experience of docking in Elite. Getting lined up, matching rotation, slowly easing in. Getting the auto-dock capability was a big upgrade, worth spending your hard-earned money for. Eve Online is in many ways just a really fancy version of Elite. Docking's too easy though.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747604Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:07:05 -0800NelsonBy: Artwhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747607
The BBC disk image is 52k...comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747607Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:09:13 -0800ArtwBy: daniel_charmshttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747619
Although I've never played the first Elite (I once found it on a disc and tried it, but could never figure out the controls), I've spent countless hours playing its sequel, Frontier. Now that was a kick-ass game. It had fucking realistic physics - meaning that if you turned your ship around while going 100 000 km/s, you would still be going in the same direction at 100 000 km/s, except with your back towards the direction you were moving in; all planets and stars had realistic gravity, and so on. On top of that, there was, I think, and infinite number of stars and planets to visit, spaceports on the planets and so on. It was also a very beautiful game, I must add.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747619Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:28:35 -0800daniel_charmsBy: malevolenthttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747642
<em>"you'd have to be some insuferable posho knobend to own your own BBC, of course, real kids had the Speccy or the C=64"</em>
<em>"I heard that, you horrible plebeian. Enjoy touch-typing on your rubber keyboard."</em>
Ah, the 8-bit rivalries will never die! I played Elite for hours on the Spectrum, it managed to be fairly easy to get into yet at the same time made space feel vast, cold and hostile.
And the docking was fantastic, just the right level of difficulty.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747642Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:00:55 -0800malevolentBy: Artwhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747647
Plus the speccy's horrible colour clash and lack of sprites wouldn't be a problem...comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747647Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:08:05 -0800ArtwBy: rodgerdhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747683
Best. Game. Evar.
When people release space sims, Elite is still the gold standard to which they are compared.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747683Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:36:03 -0800rodgerdBy: Dr Dracatorhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747775
I'm starting to get paranoid: between this and the ROM post, it seems like MeFi is somehow in contact with 12-year-old me.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747775Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:35:01 -0800Dr DracatorBy: crapmatichttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747788
After all these years, the only thing I can remember is the theme song and the stick-figure graphics of the ships. I remember it was pretty good when I got it in June 1986 for my C64 and played around with it a lot, then one day I got hooked on Ultima.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747788Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:47:15 -0800crapmaticBy: lalocheziahttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2747873
Acorn Electron for the plebean with taste but not dosh!comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2747873Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:33:28 -0800lalocheziaBy: dgbellakhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748012
Alas, I missed the boat on Elite. In my household, the Apple IIe was frequently used to boot up another space trading sim, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy">SunDog</a>. Not quite as deep as Elite looks, but still a ton of depth in a shockingly small amount of floppy disk space. (As a wee lad, I always found the idea of trading <em>frozen bodies</em> to populate your own little city to be cool but kinda morbid.)
But this is why the FSM created emulators!comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748012Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:11:08 -0800dgbellakBy: Nelsonhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748073
SunDog was a great game, too. In many ways it's more complex than Elite, certainly broader if not deeper. I particularly liked the way you'd have to leave the cockpit and go back in the engine room to repair burnt out components, replacing them with crappy shunts if necessary. Another feature vaguely echoed in Eve Online, although you can't reconfigure ships while in flight.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748073Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:35:34 -0800NelsonBy: BrotherCainehttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748166
Blue Danube burning in my brain!comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748166Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:35:42 -0800BrotherCaineBy: Chunderhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748183
I remember playing Elite with a friend - can't remember the platform, as it wasn't my computer - but the only way that we could manage to dock was for one of us to control the roll, and the other to control the velocity...
Frontier on the Amiga used to be one of my favourites, though; as daniel_charms mentions, the physics was awesome and really made the game (apart from the "jousting" style combat).
Haven't tried Oolite (downloading now) but the only thing that has ever come close to the Elite/Frontier experience is X3: Reunion - a totally awesome and involving experiencecomment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748183Sun, 20 Sep 2009 02:26:58 -0800ChunderBy: PeterMcDermotthttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748230
<em>you'd have to be some insuferable posho knobend to own your own BBC</em>
You'd have to have been an insufferable posho knobend to own a Commodore Pet, an Apple II, a TRS 80 or one of those horrendously expensive Hewlett Packard machines -- the cheapest of which would have been around £600 at the time. But the cheapest BBC Micro at release was only £235 -- just twice the price of a shitty Spectrum. C64's didn't come out until several years later. The next real rival was the horrible Vic20
Unless your mum was paying, buying a Spectrum made no sense at all.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748230Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:59:53 -0800PeterMcDermottBy: Artwhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748361
That's some quality platform warring.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748361Sun, 20 Sep 2009 09:49:44 -0800ArtwBy: jaymzjulianhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748640
<i>C64's didn't come out until several years later. The next real rival was the horrible Vic20</i>
to be fair, the c64 came out in late 1982, and the bbc in late 1981 - that's hardly "years". And obviously, the BBC and the C64 were in similar weight classes, whereas the vic20... not so much. Though that said, a vic20 with the memory expansion was not that far off a BBC....comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748640Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:06:30 -0800jaymzjulianBy: jaymzjulianhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748642
(indeed, the model A only had 16k of ram - but, like the 16k spectrum, no-one cared about that model :))comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748642Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:07:51 -0800jaymzjulianBy: Artwhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748649
I'm pretty sure, metafilter being metafilter, that if we dissed some random computer like the Dragon 32 or some weirdo Osborne"laptop" thing within hours some user of said thing would pop up to defend it.
The Commodore 16 - what the fuck was that about?comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748649Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:24:00 -0800ArtwBy: jaymzjulianhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748694
<i>The Commodore 16 - what the fuck was that about?</i>
David Haynie and Bill Herd actually did a video (for commvex 2005) a few years ago explaining this - essentially, it was supposed to be a tiny computer that competed with the zx81/spectrum. Surprisingly, I could not find this on youtube though - but the mpeg is around.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748694Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:22:48 -0800jaymzjulianBy: jaymzjulianhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748697
also, it was supposed to sell for $49comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748697Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:26:28 -0800jaymzjulianBy: jaymzjulianhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748700
also: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5ENMeGSK0M">here</a> is the video that has the justification for the commodore 16. it does acutally make sense.... it's around 7 minutes in.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748700Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:29:36 -0800jaymzjulianBy: seanyboyhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748759
£235.00?? That was an absolute fortune. I had to work my arse off for months to afford my spectrum. And then I only got 16k.
Count me in the non-posho rubber key brigade.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748759Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:32:41 -0800seanyboyBy: seanyboyhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748760
Actually my rich friend had a BBC Micro. I can still half-remember that BBC Micro smell. Somehow, it seemed quite suited to large houses with pianos.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748760Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:35:41 -0800seanyboyBy: fearfulsymmetryhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2748792
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCdNrRNS4g">Hey Hey 16K</a>
My mate had a Beeb, he was the doctor's son...comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2748792Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:36:11 -0800fearfulsymmetryBy: Leonhttp://www.metafilter.com/85183/Cobra-Mk-3#2749604
My mum recently told me how we ended up with a BBC (with a 5 1/4" 40/80 double disc drive, no less). My dad was working for one of the big defence contractors at the time, and they were offering discounted 32K BBCs to employees.
It was still more than we could really afford, and her attitude was "why on earth would we spend a godawful amount of cash on this thing?", to which he replied "just you wait, one day you'll be reading books and ordering your shopping on one of these".
Prescient, at times, my old dad.comment:www.metafilter.com,2009:site.85183-2749604Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:12:49 -0800Leon